Suicide rates are rising among U.S. nurses
resetyoureveryday.com
resetyoureveryday.com
I'm not trying to sound indifferent to the struggles of healthcare workers echoed in the piece, simply the essay, as presented, left me unsure about drawing conclusions.
Nurses who caught COVID were discouraged from being tested unless they had symptoms that would be visible to a patient because hospital administrators did not want the work of filling shifts. Couple that with the fact that more and more medical work is being offloaded onto nurses as a cost saving measure, and you have a perfect recipe for burnout.
Eventually we all benefit from them, but at any given point they are out of sight and out of mind. That causes people to not really care.
1) Their unions are actually some form of inneficient brokers who fails to truly represent them politically and change the system in their favor. Instead, they simply take a cut on their paycheck, and treats them like factory workers while they should be treated as knowledge workers. Even if nurses and teachers are super important, we treat them like cogs in a machine and fail to frame their role as an investment in society. They are ''cost centers''.
2) The north american medical system (US and Canada) might differ in their funding, but are very similar in their organization compared to European models. Its all about the physician-patient relation, the former being all powerful and the later being a moron. In Canada, they are actually not employed by the state, but are in fact their own small businesses. Oh and they have de facto state monopoly on crucial medical tasks, making every other actor their economic bottom bitch.
3) A huge number of people who choose the job are very empathic-saviour types, and actually are professional martyrs who must endure poor working conditions to save others otherwise they would be bad.
Not to necessarily knock nurse pay, it is a common route to a middle and even upper-middle class life.
If a software engineer can shave off 1 hour a year for 2 million of the 28 million nurses in the United States, that is allowing us to redeploy 228 years worth of nurse labor. We want to incentivize easy scaling solutions like that, so I do not necessarily have an issue with paying the software developer a premium if it allows us to help more people.
I don't think that this is arguing against nurses being paid well for the huge beneficial impact and selflessness they do have, but I don't think the analysis needs to be necessarily comparative with software engineers.
I'm curious, what do you think the compensation for being a nurse should look like?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_work
Care workers hold crucial jobs but are often paid much less than other professions putting forth similar effort and similar amounts of training. Often, they're told that they do it for the love of their charges (whether it's nursing, teaching, social services), and most especially the completely unpaid child care at home.
And yeah, most care work professions are associated with being "women's work".
If you want the workplace to improve, hold management responsible for their decisions.
Without that, we fall back on more qualitative, holistic methods they are both game-able and subjective.
We may see a general cultural shift towards higher teacher pay (which I believe would be positive if paired with higher professional standards), but it’s difficult to argue in our current culture that teachers “deserve” more pay when we can’t even reliably determine which teachers are having an above average educational impact.
There is one: a free market. Private schools don't have the luxury of doing studies forever; if their teaching is not effective, they go out of business. The ones who stay in business have a direct, quantitative measure of the effectiveness of their teachers: profit.
Parents don't have to "believe" teachers are effective; they can see the results for themselves and judge them. My parents had no problem telling which of my teachers were actually teaching me things and which were just boring me to death in class.
As for "rigorous", the whole point of the comment I responded to was that there are no "rigorous" third-party measures of teacher effectiveness. That's the "problem" that all these experts have been struggling unsuccessfully to solve for decades. The reason they can't solve it is that as they have conceived the "problem", it's not solvable. The people in a position to judge the effectiveness of teachers are the people who directly observe the impact of their teaching. Third-party "experts" can't do that.
Not all parents are that involved, and a kid being bored in class isn't necessarily the teacher's fault.
Then that's the root problem that needs to be fixed, and trying to invent ways for third party "experts" to "measure teacher effectiveness" won't help.
> a kid being bored in class isn't necessarily the teacher's fault
It might not be that individual teacher's fault, true; the kid might just be in the wrong class. But it still means there's a teaching problem.
Edit: The only nurse that seemed unhappy was an older agency nurse who was recently laid off from a hospital, and was having trouble finding steady work because she didn't have a four year degree. I wonder if the stress from changing standards is a factor.
Note too that covid workers were highly compensated for their work, at least where I live. Our annual income doubled last year because of her work in the covid units. The issue isn't a financial one, but from dealing first-hand with so much death, suffering, and stress on a daily basis.
Without all three of those sectors modern societies would collapse.
The Ontario Teacher's Union might be the most powerful organization in Ontario. They own major league sports teams.
Nurses salary in Bay Area is $133K, national average is $80K which is pretty good. [1]
[1] https://www.travelnursing.com/news/career-development/where-...
Edit: they own major league sports teams? That’s wild.
Education has by far one of the lowest suicide rates - of course, that's only one crude indirect measure of things. Jobs in education tend to be very stable, they are very highly regarded in the social sense (far more so than businessmen, politicians etc.) [2] In some places wages are not so good, but that's not always the case. Nurses are reasonably well comped but it's also impossible to quantify for some stress factors.
Doctor's suicide rates are effectively the highest of any profession (note that for Healthcare as an 'industry' the numbers are lower, but for Doctor specifically, it's high, i.e. most of the industry are not dealing directly with trauma, death).
Overall - I think COVID is obvious a giant bank of stress and generational PTSD and it's surprising how well the workers are taking it.
Doctors and Nurses are some of the most professional and conscientious people out there, the least likely to complain i.e. and occupational sense of duty that transcends 'compensation'.
COVID is a kind of war for them, it's just grinding them down.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6903a1.htm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7680614/
"A meta-analysis among health care workers found that compared to no masks, surgical mask and N95 respirators were not effective against transmission of viral infections or influenza-like illness based on six RCTs.
"Using separate analysis of 23 observational studies, this meta-analysis found no protective effect of medical mask or N95 respirators against SARS virus."
"A recent systematic review of 39 studies including 33,867 participants in community settings (self-report illness), found no difference between N95 respirators versus surgical masks and surgical mask versus no masks in the risk for developing influenza or influenza-like illness, suggesting their ineffectiveness of blocking viral transmissions in community settings."
Masks also make breathing more exhausting:
"Wearing facemask mechanically restricts breathing by increasing the resistance of air movement during both inhalation and exhalation process"
"trapped air remaining between the mouth, nose and the facemask is rebreathed repeatedly in and out of the body, containing low O2 and high CO2 concentrations, causing hypoxemia and hypercapnia"
Being forced to wear something which is ineffective and physically exhausting could absolutely cause burnout.
http://rc.rcjournal.com/content/55/5/569.short
Which showed no difference in O2 or CO2.
However, there is still the physical and psychological element of wearing PPE/respirators everyday which is burdensome.
Taking the average weight and height of an average woman (in the UK), and assuming the person is otherwise healthy, the risk of COVID hospitalization is 1 in 3000, and risk of death 1 in 66,000
This is from the UK's own data: https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation
There are 670,000 nurses in the UK, so if all of them got COVID, 223 of them would need hospitalisation, and 10 would die.
Admittedly this is a simple extrapolation and doesn't account for the risk to older nurses.
By contrast with a general population of 670,000 women in their 40-50s, about 1600 will die each year from any cause: http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html
That's been his daily routine for close to a year now. The hardest part for him is that now everyone in hospital dies or suffers alone. Maybe the family gets a few minutes on facetime, but that's it. He's one of the strongest and most resilient people I know and it's destroying him.
I suspect these numbers are going to increase for both after this last year. Rising suicide rates might not be nurse specific, though they do have a higher average than normal.
(some research later...)
Here's a CDC suicide-per-industry report: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6903a1.htm
Teachers have the least, at around 9.4 per 100k. Veterans are around 124 per 100k. Men have significantly higher rates across the board (including healthcare).
Strangely enough, nurses are at the bottom of the list of "above average suicide rate" industries... which I didn't expect at all. But perhaps this article means to imply that healthcare has gone up a few in that list? Unsure.
Nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides 10.2 (8.3–12.0)
10.2 is per 100k just like the data referenced by the article being discussed. The cdc report is from 2016. I wonder what's the cause of such a large discrepancy.
though that would also mean that the other positions have extremely low rates... something's not adding up.
Sounds like this journal is pandering to their audience.
I fully blame social media, no where else have I been so relentlessly attacked. I improved my own mental health tremendously by deleting this crap, no Tinder, Snapchat, Insta, etc. In fact I have an easier time making friends and meeting partners now.
Here's an experiment. After work, leave your phone at home and walk around for at least an hour. Give your brain a break from constant NOTIFICATION stimulation!
I hate this website but I can't quit it. I quit nicotine and it was easier than quitting HN.
I'm basically trying to turn my life into an RPG and leveling my character up in real life instead. It's kinda disturbing that I have to rely on video game mechanics to self motivate, but maybe that's what happens when you grow up addicted to video games and electronics. Big contrast to my dads generation, who grew up playing baseball and swinging from trees in the woods.
I use HN has a way to keep up with tech related stuff and only use it during work hours as a treat when I finish a task, this helps me get work done and gives my brain a small dopamine hit.
This leads to mean world syndrome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome
Believe it or not, if you are healthy you're much more likely to die in a car accident than anything else the regular media wants you to believe:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm